When Ronald Reagan became president in January 1981, the nation had just endured a recession the year before. Then another recession materialized on Reagan’s watch in a few months’ time, in the fall of 1981. The labor force participation rate—which measures the proportion of the population at work or looking—had been rising throughout the 1970s, but [...]
“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, “Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.” Thus did Kipling, the Poet of Empire, caution the British about the Eastern world the Victorians and Edwardians believed to be theirs. And with that world so inflamed against us, [...]
“And if anyone loves righteousness, her labors are the virtues,” the author of the Jewish Book of Wisdom assures us. “For she teaches self-control and prudence, justice and courage; nothing in life is more profitable for men than these.” Though the word has more significance today than it did a decade ago in the western [...]
Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court’s Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice edited and with commentary by Kevin A. Ring. The Opinions of Justice Antonin Scalia: The Caustic Conservative edited and with commentary by Paul I. Weizer. Justice Antonin Scalia has established himself as the foremost defender of the constitutional orthodoxy of originalism—in particular, of the [...]
Faced with a complex, hard-to-solve problem, there is a natural human tendency to solve a much simpler, easier one instead. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, dubs this cognitive process “substitution.” We know our political system is broken. The signs are everywhere: knee-jerk partisanship, massive debts and unfunded liabilities, widespread [...]
Forbes columnist extraordinaire Peter Ferrara was once kind enough to call my own Econoclasts “a brilliant, overlooked book.” I know another brilliant book that wasn’t overlooked when it came out last year (it was a bestseller), James Rickards’s Currency Wars, but it sure could do with a dose of renewed publicity and attention about now. [...]
The phrase “compassionate conservatism” is of recent origin. While any number of politicians have laid claim to it, one thing is certain: it was born of the worry that being labeled a “conservative,” simply, would cause you to be portrayed as lacking in basic human feelings, particularly for the plight of the poor. Thus “compassionate [...]
In an age that seems to believe that Christianity is an obstacle to liberty it will prove provocative to insist, contrary to such belief, that Christian faith is essential to liberty’s very existence. Yet, as counter-intuitive as it may seem to disciples of the progressivist zeitgeist, it must be insisted that faith enshrines freedom. Without [...]
It was when he stepped outside And stood there on his porch He knew he’d hear it once again, The phrase persistent to his memory. Three times now in less than half a year. He knew he’d need a logic once again, Some words to offer when the young girl called To ask for words [...]
Chilton Williamson, Jr. is a prolific author of both fiction and non-fiction who has worked as an editor for St. Martin’s Press, National Review, and, since 1989, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by the Rockford Institute. His most recent book is After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy(ISI, 2012), which John Willson, professor [...]
The charge about the old days of the American economy—the nineteenth century, the “Gilded Age,” the era of the “robber barons”—was that it was always beset by a cycle of boom and bust. Whatever nice runs of expansion and opportunity that did come, they always seemed to be coupled with a pretty cataclysmic depression right [...]
The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, Revolution, by Gregg L. Frazer The religious views of America’s founders have been fiercely contested in the public arena for many years. The principal battle is between those who claim that most founders were devout Christians and those who assert that they were deists. This debate has important [...]
One of the greatest Catholic intellects and writers of the twentieth century, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), worried deeply about the ideological, political, and cultural crises of the western world during the entirety of his adult life. The root of the problem, Dawson had come to believe between the two world wars, was the fundamental decline in [...]
Mitt Romney on Wednesday night turned in the finest debate performance of any candidate of either party in the 52 years since Richard Nixon faced John F. Kennedy, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan’s demolition of Jimmy Carter in 1980. But where Reagan won with style and–“There you go again”–and his closing line, “Are [...]